Gowing, Margaret | Britain and Atomic Energy

First editions, first impressions. The complete set of this important work by the foremost historian of Britain’s nuclear policy, together with the uncommon guide to the unpublished government papers cited in the first book, Britain and Atomic Energy 1939-1945. Rare in such nice condition.

Margaret Gowing (1921-1998) “was at once a distinguished historian and a redoubtable champion of a variety of causes that reflected her keen perception of what constituted the public interest. Her scholarly reputation rested primarily on her magisterial studies of atomic energy in Britain during and after the Second World War” (obituary in the Independent, November 20, 1998).

Gowing took a First in economic history at the London School of Economics in 1941, then held posts at the Ministry of Supply and Board of Trade, followed by the Cabinet Office, where she spent fourteen years as part of the team producing civil histories of the Second World War. In 1959 she joined the Atomic Energy Authority as historian and archivist.

“In Britain and Atomic Energy 1939-1945 (1964) and its two-volume sequel, Independence and Deterrence (1974, written with the assistance of her friend and collaborator Lorna Arnold), she offered a characteristically clear-eyed account of the fashioning and implementation of British policy with regard to atomic energy from the outbreak of the war until October 1952, when "Hurricane" - the test of a rather primitive bomb at Monte Bello, a group of islands off the north-west coast of Australia - propelled Britain to the status of the world's third nuclear power.

These books, along with her many articles, major public lectures, and penetrating reviews, established her not merely as a peerless chronicler and analyst of a crucial facet of the war effort and of Britain's subsequent struggles to maintain great power status, but also as a leading commentator on the relations between science and government. Her election first to the British Academy in 1975 and 13 years later to the Royal Society recognised equally the quality and the breadth of her work and placed her, with Sir Karl Popper and Joseph Needham, among the tiny handful of those who have been Fellows of both bodies” (the Independent).